Piper Jaffray “Street Test” Of Google vs. Siri Misses The Point

No sooner did I hit “publish” on my earlier post, Google’s “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice , than people on Twitter started responding that I was out of my mind. A couple of people cited a Piper Jaffray study , published yesterday, comparing the accuracy and breadth of Siri “search results” vs. Google in a “street test” in Minneapolis. Google Gets a “B+” Siri Gets a “D” In short Google was graded with a “B+” in terms of accuracy, while Siri got a “D.” It’s really an “apples to oranges” comparison, however. Let’s take a look at the methodology. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and his minions asked an iPhone (Siri) 1,600 questions, half of which were in a room and half of which were on a noisy street. The same questions were input into Google. However it’s not clear whether this was in Safari, on a Google iPhone app or on an Android dev...